Yes the view parent/child relationship is helpful, plus you can view the relationships in the sketch itself and filter by “dandling” to see the ones that are no longer defined, delete them, then redefine the sketches.
After reading my post, I realize that the model I have is pretty straightforward. Basically it is a monolithic microfluidic plate that has a whole bunch of features and sweeps, but had only one major extrude that everything was based on. So, my workaround is very unlikely to work for all applications.

I’ve tried a variation on your workaround, but it didn’t work out to smoothly. I’ve been on a pro|e project for the last 6 months, but I’ll have to try the work around next time I’m in SW

I think you can view references for any feature, but I don’t think that solves the problem. I think what you’re saying is that you create a sketch as one of the first few features, then you use it in an extrude later on, and it pulls the sketch into the extrude so that it is no longer visible at the top of the model tree.

That sucks. I don’t have any workarounds. Cumulatively, I’ve lost hours to that problem.

FYI as a “work around” to replace sketch, I created
an unmerged extruded body from my “replacement” sketch.  With
two bodies in the picture, moved all the children features from bottom to top
to the new body.  By the time the top is reached, delete the old sketch
along with its extrusion feature.  Other time consuming trouble shooting
may result, especially coincident mates to the old body in any downstream
sketches.  Replace sketch option would be
key.

Also, is there any trick to managing the sketch hierarchy better?
 PRO does this by default in the tree, but SW seems to let you get away
with murder.  This always causes slowdowns for me when sketches are out of
order with the features, especially after reordering the features in tree, or
using sketches several features after they are created.  Not sure if there
is an easy way to do this.  Maybe a special tab next to the configs tab
with order of sketches?  I can also picture it looking like a family
tree layout showing the connecting elements between parent/child sketches.  

I saw it on your email. Those renderings look sharp.

Respect.

Now if they would just get something like Solidworks’ FILL command.

Br3ttman